Saturday, November 7, 2015

When Justice Looks Like Paperwork

It’s the end of the month, so I’m going over my budget and
making sure everything is accounted for. Every purchase I’ve made all month is
meticulously recorded, receipts are duly labeled, photographed, and filed in a manila
folder. It’s tedious work. My spreadsheet rarely comes out right. I don’t like
doing this.

My friends, family, and church donated generously through
Mennonite Central Committee so that I could work here at the Association for a
More Just Society, and through MCC all my expenses are
paid – rent, food, transportation – as long as they’re all properly documented
in my Excel sheet. Sometimes I wonder, when I enter my daily fifty-cent bus
fare, whether this is all a little bit much.

But there is a reason for this sort of attentiveness,
however time-consuming. In fact, I’m becoming convinced that these are the
details that matter about an organization, that these records and audits and
due process, as unsexy as they might seem, are actively bringing about justice.

“Transparency” and “accountability” are the mantras here in
an organization that spends most of its time making sure that the government
works as it’s supposed to. It’s an
uphill battle. No one thinks that they’re a crook, especially not people who
have been unchallenged their whole lives. No one thinks they need the sort of accountability
that exhaustive documentation provides.

Certainly a few corrupt people exploit regulatory gaps to
steal millions of dollars or threaten others’ lives. But most people’s
corruption looks a lot more tame. It’s clocking in twenty minutes before you
actually start to work. It’s failing to get a signature. It’s signing off on
something you didn’t actually do, because you’ll get to it eventually.

It’s not that any of those minor infractions breaks a
system, but the culture it creates, the balance of risks and rewards it shifts,
starts to strain a system to its breaking point.

The Association for a More Just Society (AJS) is
Transparency International’s local chapter here, and last year signed a
landmark agreement with the Honduran government that charged them, as civil
society, with monitoring the transparency and anti-corruption efforts of major
government ministries.

That’s how I found myself from the first day elbows deep in
the Honduran Education System’s Purchasing and Contracts protocols. I
translated graphs of compliance percentages and documentation delivered and began
to realize why people say that the Devil’s in the details.

You can’t talk about justice on a big scale without talking
about justice on a small scale. You can’t talk about education reform without
making sure that it’s recorded whether your teachers actually show up to teach
their classes.

Take health – Honduras is one of the poorest countries in
Central America, and approximately 70% of its population depend on
publicly-funded hospitals for all their medical care. Yet too often they’re
sent home without desperately-needed medicine to treat illnesses from heart
disease to schizophrenia because the hospitals don’t have the necessary
medicines in stock. When I visited the hospital, doctors talked about buying
extra sutures with their own money for the times when the dispensary ran out
mid-surgery.

There are two ways to respond to this system that isn’t
working as it should. One could create supplemental medical brigades, donate medicines
from abroad and send foreign doctors, form health nonprofits or give
low-interests loans to purchase medicines on the private market. Or one could
go to the source, the Ministry of Health itself, and start to ask questions
about why it isn’t working like it
should.

Transformemos Honduras, a program of AJS, did the latter,
sending request after request for the sort of official documentation that would
help them see how medicine purchasing was being managed. Though Honduran law
says the information should be delivered within ten days, they waited six
months, during which time these justice fighters probably didn’t feel very much
like heroes.

When what documentation there was began to come together, it
told a bleak story. The Ministry of Health wasn’t analyzing the market to see
how much medicines should cost, and it wasn’t following the purchase contract
process in the way the law laid out. That meant it was paying double, triple,
even seven times as much for medicines as it should. What’s worse, the
companies themselves were involved in writing the purchase orders, telling the
Ministry of Health what medicines it should purchase instead of the other way
around.

The already-strained Ministry of Health was overpaying for
medicines that weren’t even necessarily the ones that were needed. Even worse, some
of these medicines were never delivered, while others were delivered in
unacceptable quality – after audits started, auditors found some medicines
infected with bacteria, while others were delivered with only four of their 11
essential ingredients.

The story gets even worse – the warehousing government
medicines was run by a woman who appeared to use the stash as her personal
piggybank, forging medicine orders and selling the excess, mismanaging the
disorganized warehouse so that expensive pills were left to spoil while people
in hospitals died for lack of drugs.

In 2013, Transformemos Honduras presented their report,
which was numbers and percentages and all the little pieces of methodology that
sometimes seem unimportant. The effect was electric. The Honduran government
immediately removed the director from her position. She, along with other wealthy, powerful
people would eventually face consequences -- caught in their corruption by a missing trail of paperwork.

It’s not always fun or exciting to sift through hundreds of
spreadsheets or file the government forms that will give you access to hundreds
more. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. We need to realize that
investment in “unsexy” work like social audits and performance reviews is
foundational to creating systems that serve the most vulnerable well, and that
transparency and accountability aren’t just buzzwords, they’re building blocks
to better systems.

Working at AJS, I’m empowered to be a part of civil
society’s oversight of government systems. But transparency and accountability
touch my own life as well. It matters that I account for the money I spend,
that I’m willing to be as open with my use of others’ funds as I want the
government to be with their’s.

So I stare at the expense column in front of me. I write my
daily 50 cents under the appropriate column in my expense spreadsheet, hit save, and then hit send.